The madhouse statuary seemed to dispel the pre-life we gave it. 
in sleep, to become the one bauble rescued from that  hoard, whose shapes 
no one now will know. It cannot be said they existed. Yet 
surely there was life, once in those seams, life the daughters of the iron teeth 
of time gave it, and swallows flew over it. One might  say, casually, 
that there was variation in it, that there was texture. More, though, 
one still couldn’t say. Yet one day the sanitation  department decreed 
it was coming through, a nice day in May with the  usual blossoms, though these 
were only accessories, having no bearing on the tale or 
its context, petal-like, in fact, like a cat’s nose, but the judge